Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

Stop CISPA. NOW. It goes to vote MONDAY.

Total internet surveillance, without legal recourse. Facebook and other big tech companies are supporting giving information to the government without warrants, so that when they cooperate with the government they can’t be held accountable to the users whose privacy they violated.

If this goes down, my Facebook account will be purged of everything I can purge, and will go dark permanently. Not that it’ll matter, because if the law is passed, using any server geolocated in the US is tantamount to saying “yes, US government, you can have all my personal information.”

Stephanie has some form letters you could use to rally your congresscritters against this nonsense.
The companies publicly supporting this sweeping, over-broad anti-privacy power grab are:

It appears that the War on Terror has passed the tipping point. Insane amounts of money are being appropriated by a multitude of Federal Security Agencies. They seek to increase size of their fiefdoms and their power over the citizens that pay their salaries.

Their work is highly redundant and they produce tens of thousands of reports every year, so many that most of them have to end up just being ignored.

Paying wolves to keep you safe from other wolves is always risky.

As Ben Franklin said, “He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither. People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.”

I’ve already sent mails, but I’m in the district of Levin and Stabenow. One co-wrote (along with McCain) the provisions that allows indefinite military detention of US citizens and the other supported it, and both probably think tubes have something to do with the internet. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts anything short of several hundred million dollars in bribes (lets face it, ‘campaign donations’ are basically legalized bribery) will have any effect on them.

Switched from OpenOffice to LibreOffice when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems and half the OOo contributors jumped ship. I haven’t purchased an Intel processor (knowing bought a product containing an intel processor) in 15 years. And I think the last time I payed for a Microsoft product was when I was required to have MS Access (database program) for a college class.
I don’t have to worry about cancelling my facebook account because I’ve never had one (and can now say that with even more pride).

Hmm. Cell phone is verizon, and that’s a bit of a harder one to deal with. Verizon is the only company that covers everywhere we go with any reliability, and with certain family member’s medical issues, we need the reliable connection.

Not at all surprised to see MS throwing it’s support in behind it, and Oracle started playing by the MS business guidebook 5 years or so back. Disappointing, but again not surprising.

I haven’t slept yet, so I apologize now for any horrible, horrible grammar I may have dumped here.

Jeez. I went to my rep’s page to submit a letter; I haven’t contacted my rep since this one (not my choice) won over the previous person. It may be that the form is a total template, but I noticed a couple of things I hadn’t remembered about contacting the last rep. In the drop-down of major categories this email was about, there were no choices related to computing or privacy, but there was an entire category choice for “second amendment”. Yeah. He considers that to be an equivalent category to “budget”, “agriculture”, “taxes”, etc. And then it wouldn’t let me submit until I put something in the prefix area; is it that important for them to know if I’m a Mr. or a Ms.? That’s one of the few times I happily pull rank and used that instead. It’s Dr. to you, jerk.